In the beginning of my protagonist’s academic journey, he wins a math competition in which he beats all the Jewish Israeli students because he is smarter than them and thus wins a scholarship to the university and a stipend. Ahmed, like a responsible son, was supporting his family and was barely able to keep them afloat.
Had he tried to go to one of the institutions of higher education on the West Bank and Gaza like my critic suggested, he would have had to deport himself and would have been unable to return to Israel to see his family, much less his father who remains in prison. This critic likened The Almond Tree withThe Help by Kathryn Stockett. Her main criticism of The Help seems to be that Stockett’s characters are stereotypical Aunt Jemima or Mammy characters. My Palestinian protagonist is a genius who is smarter than his Jewish colleagues and goes on to win a Nobel Prize. I wouldn’t deem that all stereotypical.
He is also insensitive and harsh towards his new wife for his own incapacity to be with his former wife.
This is not an unusual storyline in novels, films, and plays about arranged marriages and indeed as part of my graduate studies at Harvard, I took a course in Arabic literature called East/West. A major theme in the course was about Eastern men who went to the West, fell in love with Western women, returned home and were blinded by the West until they realised the greatness of their own culture. In The Almond Tree, Ahmed is, at first, blinded (by the West which his first wife Nora symbolises) to the greatness of his Palestinian wife Yasmeen and how well suited they are for each other, but when their son is born, his blinders come off. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a person who is still mourning his first wife’s death not to immediately fall in love with another woman.
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel written by a white woman in the voice of a black slave, the author felt that white women would be the most likely to be sympathetic to the plight of the slaves. Therefore, Stowe made female abolitionists, such as Eva, angelic in order to give white women heroines to emulate. Likewise are the Jewish racists such as Professor Sharon, whom at first, I portrayed as evil and ugly.